This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

How do you follow up one of the most feature-packed phones in the world?

Samsung answers that big question with the Galaxy S5, now in stores. The Korean electronics manufacturer has spent huge on marketing and a vast array of phone and phablet products, which has helped turn the company into the second largest phone-maker in the world behind Apple.

The Galaxy family of phones has also improved, and the S4 came with a slew of whiz-bang features that were almost overwhelming for users. It definitely required some patience and experimentation to learn to use it just right. Some of the additions came off as downright gimmicky. But it’s hard to knock, the sales numbers, which finally gave some real hype to Android devices.

For its encore, Samsung has definitely gone iterative, as opposed to truly innovative, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

As with all tech, this year’s model bristles with impressive specs, a 2.5GHz quad-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, a 2800mAh battery, 16/32GB of memory (with up to 128GB extra through microSD), and the phone is really fast, jumping among apps and online.

Article Continued Below

In terms of the design, it is slightly thicker than the S4, with a larger 5.1-inch screen, and has a thicker metal band running around its body, that attaches to the new pinhole-covered back. The back is supposed to seem classier, but it has a sort of faux leather feel that still appears cheap and is boxier than the previous model. Its most recently released Android competitor, the HTC One M8, still wins on the design front with its all-metal body that feels much sleeker.

But the Samsung’s back and metal band help provide a useful function: the phone is water resistant. Now that doesn’t mean you should go swimming with it, but according to IP67 standards, it can be submerged for a short time and still remain working. The body also makes it more dust resistant.

Another smart improvement is the battery life; I got almost a day and a half of regular use out of it. It also has an Ultra Battery Saving mode, which in an emergency can suck hours of extra life from a dying battery. You still have to be careful how you use your phone, but it turns off things like background notifications that suck up power.

The 5.1-inch Super Amoled display remains one of the tops on the market. It also has a large number of controls to get it just right. It’s a gorgeous screen, really bright and sharp, and one of the best features of the phone.

The camera has been improved too, bumping up to 16 megapixels from 13 in the previous model. The company is hyping the swift autofocus feature and that works fairly well, but it’s not perfect, and I had to fiddle with it to get the right focus. But it takes bright, beautiful pictures.

Cellphone innovation is a copycat business, so Samsung has followed the competition with an onscreen fingerprint scanner to unlock the phone. Unfortunately, this scanner is finicky, and finger placement needs to be just so to get it to work right. It is just not as good as the TouchID on the iPhone 5S.

The other addition is a sensor on the back, underneath the camera, which works as a heart-rate monitor, which reads your pulse from your finger. It’s obviously not as accurate as a chest monitor, but it works fairly well. This can be chalked up to the company’s commitment to S Health, Samsung’s suite of health monitoring tools, which work with its smartwatch and the Gear Fit, the flashy activity monitor bracelet.

But the key things to take away are that while this phone still has many of the S4’s features, a lot of the thinking went into improving some of the basics like speed, durability and battery life.

It is not the slickest designed phone, and the harder question is whether those improvements are enough to mandate an upgrade. The common sense approach is that for most people, even last year’s model is more than good enough. There doesn’t seem to be a killer feature that should make people run out and get it, but by dialing down the hype a little bit, Samsung has made a phone that improves on a lot of the things that really matter to consumers. In these days of over-hyped innovation cellphone feature wars, that actually feels refreshing.

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com